Lessons Of A Heat Wave Deadly For Self-reliant Elderly

July 23, 1995|JAMES G. DRISCOLL and Editorial Writer

During an Upper Midwestern summer, balmy days and soft nights vanish quickly when a torrid heat wave scorches every farm and city. The resilient souls who live there brush off winter's ice and snow with aplomb, but aren't as familiar with blistering temperatures topping 100.

In the Milwaukee of my distant youth, air conditioning was rare, and a favored tactic to escape heat waves was to flee "down to the lake."On hot nights once or twice a year, families grabbed pillows and boarded streetcars to the Lake Michigan shore, always a cooler place.

Crime was infrequent, and parents didn't worry about their children sleeping next to them in Juneau, Lake or South Shore parks. It was healthier to lose blood to voracious mosquitoes than to be stricken with heat exhaustion in a sweltering flat or apartment.

This month's heat wave that burned the Midwest and killed hundreds of residents brought back vivid memories of summer survival tactics. The poignant stories in 1995, of elderly Midwesterners who died because of the heat, shattered many hearts, not excluding mine.

For Mabel Swanson, 87, of Chicago, the self-reliance of a lifetime collided with scalding temperatures that reached 106. "She had her pride," said a compassionate neighbor who offered her a bed in his family's air-conditioned apartment as a respite for the night.

She declined, which Midwesterners, especially of a certain age, will understand. Rely on yourself. That's an overriding rule for Midwesterners I know. If absolutely necessary, accept a little help from family or friends - but not much and not for long. Always find a way to pay it back, whether in money or work or zucchini from the garden.

Avoid government help. In our family, it was a source of quiet satisfaction that during the Depression we "never went on relief," the 1930s term for welfare.

We, like Mabel Swanson, had our pride. In her case, perhaps self-reliance should have been replaced, for a night, by a painful recognition of reality.

She was found the next morning on the floor, dead of heart disease exacerbated by the heat. A cordless phone, the speed-dialing set so she could call a neighbor immediately, lay unused in her walker.

For Walter Waiter, 81, the heat combined in deadly fashion with another Midwest tradition, the storm window. As a child I protested at being told to help take down storm windows in spring, only to put them back in the autumn.

Why bother? Decades later, the answer was found in Waiter's closed-tight apartment, the storm windows still in place in July. He died because no outside air could enter the Chicago dwelling.

In Milwaukee, where heat triggered 60 deaths, 18 died because of a different lethal combination: Modern drugs plus high temperatures. The medical examiner said 18 people perished who were taking anti-psychotic drugs that block the body's usual ability to release heat. Labels on such drugs warn users to avoid extreme heat, which is difficult for anyone without access to air conditioning.

Some of us forget that. Those who take air-conditioning for granted, at home and in the car and at the office, don't always realize substantial numbers of Americans live without cooled air.

Cool air usually is considered merely a pleasant comfort, not a necessity for living. At times of crisis, though, a constant stream of conditioned air blowing out of a vent can preserve human life.

In the centers of American cities, largely unnoticed, frail and elderly people live alone in cramped quarters and fight off the elements as best they can. They try to preserve their independence as long as possible and are encouraged to do so by professionals who give advice to the elderly - professionals who live elsewhere, under temperate conditions.

The alone and lonely, often widows because women live longer, also contend with the impact of small and stagnant incomes. To save money, even in such bastions of apparent wealth as Boca Raton, financially pressed widows will cut back on electricity, which means shutting off the air and opening the condo or apartment windows.

America's elderly often are called "greedy geezers" because of their battles for pension and Social Security benefits. Maybe the phrase is accurate in some cases, but not for Mabel Swanson, Walter Waiter and hundreds of other elderly Midwesterners whose lives were burned away by heat combined with other deadly factors.